{"id":129081,"date":"2026-04-08T16:00:52","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T10:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/saasrat.com\/blog\/?p=129081"},"modified":"2026-04-30T12:44:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T07:14:16","slug":"oh-dear-founder-interviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/saasrat.com\/blog\/oh-dear-founder-interviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh Dear Founder Interview: $1M ARR, No Free Tier, No VC Money"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quick facts before we start:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Founder<\/strong><\/td>\nMattias Geniar<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Co-Founder<\/strong><\/td>\nFreek Van der Herten<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Product<\/strong><\/td>\nOh Dear – Website monitoring platform<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Founded<\/strong><\/td>\n2017<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Revenue<\/strong><\/td>\n$1M+ ARR ($83K+\/month)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Team Size<\/strong><\/td>\n2 founders (no employees)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Funding<\/strong><\/td>\n$0 (fully bootstrapped)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Website<\/strong><\/td>\nohdear.app<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Most SaaS founder stories follow the same arc: raise money, hire fast, grow at all costs. Mattias Geniar’s story doesn’t follow any of that. He and his co-founder Freek Van der Herten built Oh Dear, a website monitoring tool, to over $1 million in annual recurring revenue<\/strong> with just the two of them. No employees. No venture capital. No free tier. And the marketing strategy that actually worked? Talking about what they were building on social media for eight years straight.<\/p>\n

We sat down with Mattias to talk about how they got here, what they wasted money on, and why he thinks most SaaS founders get distribution completely wrong.<\/p>\n

The Origin Story<\/h2>\n

SaaSRat: Give us the 60-second version. What is Oh Dear and why does it exist?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Oh Dear monitors your entire website, not just whether the homepage loads. We check uptime, SSL certificate expiration, broken links, DNS changes, Lighthouse SEO scores, accessibility issues, and server health. Most monitoring tools just ping your homepage and tell you it’s up. That’s maybe 10% of what can actually go wrong with a website. We built Oh Dear because we kept running into problems that our existing tools completely missed.<\/p>\n

SaaSRat: You were already working full-time when you started this. What was the moment you decided to actually build it?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> I was working as a sysadmin at a managed hosting provider. Freek was a partner at a web agency. We were both managing websites for clients every day, and we kept hitting the same wall. A client’s SSL certificate would expire and we’d find out because a customer complained, not because our monitoring caught it. Or a deployment would break 200 internal links and nobody would notice for weeks. We looked at every monitoring tool out there and none of them covered all of it in one place. So one day we just said, “We know exactly what this tool should do. Let’s build it ourselves.”<\/p>\n

SaaSRat: When was that?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Around 2017. We started building it on the side while keeping our day jobs. Neither of us quit anything to do this. We just shipped features in evenings and weekends.<\/p>\n

Building the Product<\/h2>\n

SaaSRat: What did the first version look like?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Very basic. Uptime monitoring, certificate expiration alerts, and the crawler. The crawler was our differentiator from day one. It works like a search engine: it follows every link on your site, checks every page, finds broken links, detects mixed HTTP\/HTTPS content, and flags issues page by page. Nobody else was doing that as part of a monitoring tool. Everything else, uptime pings, certificate checks, those were table stakes. The crawler was what made people pay attention.<\/p>\n

SaaSRat: You built it on Laravel and PHP. Some people would say that’s boring tech in 2026. Does that bother you?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Not even a little bit. Our tech stack is intentionally boring. Laravel, PHP, MySQL, Redis, ClickHouse for analytics. We run bare metal servers for dispatch and about 50 VMs spread across DigitalOcean, Vultr, and AWS for global monitoring coverage. When your entire product is about reliability and uptime, the last thing you want is a bleeding-edge stack that introduces instability. We process over a million monitoring jobs daily. Boring and stable is exactly right for that.<\/p>\n

SaaSRat: You chose to have no free tier. Just a free trial. That’s a bold move for a monitoring tool. Why?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Because free users cost money and rarely convert. Every monitor we run uses server resources, bandwidth, and storage. If someone isn’t willing to pay after trying the product, they probably weren’t going to pay at month six either. We offer a free trial so you can test everything, but after that, you either see the value or you don’t. Our pricing is simple: you pay based on how many sites you monitor. All features included, no feature gating, no tiers. That clarity actually helps conversion because people don’t have to figure out which plan they need.<\/p>\n

The Growth Story: What Worked and What Didn’t<\/h2>\n

SaaSRat: You’re at $1M ARR now. Walk us through how you got there. What was the growth curve like?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Slow. Very slow for years, then it picked up. In the early days, we launched to a mailing list of about 500 people we’d built up by sharing screenshots, code snippets, and design mockups on Twitter before the product was ready. About 10% of that list converted to paying customers. That gave us nearly 20 paying users on day one and around $1,500 in monthly revenue.<\/p>\n

Then it was just grinding. Adding features, improving the crawler, responding to every support request personally. Growth was mostly word of mouth. One developer would tell another. Someone would mention us in a conference talk. A blog post would reference us. It compounded very slowly and then, after a few years, noticeably faster.<\/p>\n

SaaSRat: You said you tried paid advertising. What happened?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> We spent a ton on Google Ads. It made no meaningful difference. The monitoring tool market is saturated. You’re bidding against companies with massive ad budgets for keywords like “website monitoring” and “uptime checker.” Even when we got clicks, the conversion was terrible because people clicking ads are usually still in research mode, not buying mode.<\/p>\n

We also tried paid SEO articles. Most of them were garbage. The only content our audience actually cared about was content we wrote ourselves. Developers and DevOps people can smell outsourced marketing copy from a mile away.<\/p>\n

Reddit Ads were the least bad of the bunch. We got some traction there, but still nothing compared to organic word of mouth.<\/p>\n

SaaSRat: So what actually worked for marketing?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Building in public. Full stop. Freek and I both had around 20 years of online presence before Oh Dear existed. We’d been blogging, tweeting, speaking at conferences, and contributing to open source for decades. When we launched Oh Dear, we already had an audience that trusted us. We didn’t have to convince strangers to try our product. We just told people we already knew, “Hey, we built this thing.”<\/p>\n

And then we kept being vocal about everything. Revenue numbers, feature decisions, bugs we fixed, mistakes we made. People started following the Oh Dear journey as a story, not just a product. When you’re transparent about the business, people root for you. And people who root for you recommend your product.<\/p>\n

SaaSRat: What’s your advice for founders who don’t have 20 years of audience to tap into?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Start building that audience now. Don’t build in private. Don’t hide what you’re working on. Be vocal on social media even if it’s scary. Share what you’re learning. Share your progress. The worst thing that can happen is someone gives you negative feedback early, which actually saves you from building the wrong thing. The best thing that can happen is you build a following that’s ready to buy when you launch.<\/p>\n

If you absolutely can’t wait to build an audience first, then find distribution channels where your buyers already hang out. Platforms like SaaSRat where people are actively comparing tools and reading real user discussions. That kind of channel puts your product in front of people at the exact moment they’re deciding what to buy. That’s worth way more than a Google Ad click from someone who’s just browsing.<\/p>\n

The Hard Parts<\/h2>\n

SaaSRat: What’s been the hardest part of running Oh Dear?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Distribution. Hands down. Building the product is the easy part for us. We’re engineers. We love writing code and shipping features. But getting the product in front of new people consistently? That’s a completely different skill set, and it never stops being hard. Even at $1M ARR, distribution is our biggest challenge.<\/p>\n

SaaSRat: You’ve been doing this for eight years with just two people. Do you ever think about hiring?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> We think about it, but we haven’t pulled the trigger. Adding employees changes everything. Payroll, management, communication overhead, legal obligations. Right now, Freek and I split everything cleanly. I handle support, admin, monitoring-related development, and proof of concepts. He does core PHP development, refactoring, and the crawler. We talk when we need to and otherwise just ship. That simplicity is hard to give up.<\/p>\n

SaaSRat: Any regrets?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> The money we spent on paid advertising. Every dollar we put into Google Ads and outsourced content would have been better spent on literally anything else. Conference sponsorships, design improvements, even taking a week off. The ROI on paid channels for a bootstrapped monitoring tool in a saturated market is close to zero. We should have trusted word of mouth from the beginning and never tried to shortcut it.<\/p>\n

Quick-Fire Round<\/h2>\n

Best business decision you’ve made?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Not going solo. Having a co-founder kept us accountable through the slow years. When I was burned out, Freek pushed forward. When he was burned out, I did. A solo founder in our position would have quit by year three.<\/p>\n

Worst money you’ve spent?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Google Ads. Not close.<\/p>\n

One tool you can’t run the business without?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Laravel. It’s the backbone of everything. Spark gave us user management, payments, and VAT handling out of the box. It saved us months of development.<\/p>\n

Best money you’ve spent?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Hiring a professional designer. Neither of us can design. We paid a designer to make Oh Dear look good, and it paid for itself within three months. In a crowded market, looking polished is the difference between a signup and a bounce.<\/p>\n

If Oh Dear didn’t exist, what would you be building?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Probably something else in the DevOps space. Infrastructure tooling, maybe server management. We build what we need, and we always need better tools for managing servers and websites.<\/p>\n

One sentence of advice for someone about to launch a SaaS product?<\/h3>\n

Mattias:<\/strong> Build in public, charge from day one, and find at least one person to build it with.<\/p>\n

What SaaS Founders Can Learn From Oh Dear’s Journey<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. You don’t need a free tier to grow<\/strong> – Oh Dear offers a free trial but no permanent free plan. If your product delivers clear value, people will pay for it. Free tiers attract users who never convert and cost you server resources every month.<\/li>\n
  2. Paid ads don’t work for every market<\/strong> – In saturated categories like website monitoring, Google Ads burn money fast with poor returns. Oh Dear’s entire growth came from word of mouth and building in public. Know your market before spending on ads.<\/li>\n
  3. Two people can build a $1M ARR business<\/strong> – Oh Dear has zero employees. Two founders with complementary skills, one on systems and support, one on code, split the work cleanly and keep overhead near zero.<\/li>\n
  4. Your audience is your distribution<\/strong> – Mattias and Freek had 20 years of blogging, tweeting, and conference speaking before Oh Dear launched. That pre-built trust turned into paying customers on day one. If you don’t have an audience yet, start building one before you launch.<\/li>\n
  5. Boring tech is a feature, not a limitation<\/strong> – PHP, MySQL, and Redis power a million monitoring jobs a day. When your product needs to be reliable above everything else, stability beats novelty every time.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Explore Oh Dear and Website Monitoring Tools on SaaSRat<\/h2>\n

    Oh Dear is proof that two people with deep domain knowledge, a “boring” tech stack, and the patience to build in public for eight years can outperform VC-funded competitors. If you’re evaluating website monitoring tools, SaaSRat helps you see what real users are discussing about Oh Dear and its alternatives based on actual conversations, not paid placements.<\/p>\n

    Explore the top website monitoring and uptime tools on SaaSRat to find the right fit for your team.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Quick facts before we start: Founder Mattias Geniar Co-Founder Freek Van der Herten Product Oh Dear – Website monitoring platform Founded 2017 Revenue $1M+ ARR ($83K+\/month) Team Size 2 founders (no employees) Funding $0 (fully bootstrapped) Website ohdear.app Most SaaS founder stories follow the same arc: raise money, hire fast, grow at all costs. Mattias […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":415,"featured_media":129084,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_et_pb_head_code":"","_inpost_head_script":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOh Dear Founder Interview: $1M ARR, No Free Tier, No VC Money<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mattias Geniar built Oh Dear to $1M ARR with a co-founder, no free tier, and zero outside funding. 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